As long as mankind has been able to carry water or other beverages in flasks and bottles the problem of spillage and breakage has plagued those who would seek to carry or transport those flasks and bottles. In today's modern worldwide market, beverages are moved and transported around the world and in so being are often subjected to various extremes and excessive jostling. These inherent extremes and jostling often result in either spillage or breakage and thus a loss of the amount of the beverage product being transported to its end destination. For many beverage producers and their customers, this is an unacceptable situation. As such, many patents have issued in attempts to limit such losses while maintaining transportability.
For instance, one example is U.S. Pat. No. 4,889,261, issued Dec. 26, 1989 to Conrad, which relates to an assembly for the containment and dispensing of beverages. The assembly has a hollow body enclosing a chamber in which the beverage is contained. A port to the chamber, cut through the skin of the body of the assembly, and a removable closure means allow fluid communication between the chamber and outside. A further projection from the skin of the body of the assembly serves as a mount for a drinking vessel such as a cup. While adequate for containment of a beverage, the molding of the projection for the mounting of the drinking vessel takes up valuable containment volume as the chamber is indented to account for the area of the drinking vessel. As such, this may be inadequate for transportation and shipping purposes where maximizing volume is essential. Furthermore, the intricate molding of the projection may be difficult to achieve and may raise the cost of manufacturing the assembly.
While developing a device for the adequate protection and containment of a beverage has been problematic, another issue has been developing a cap to adequately allow access to the beverage once the device has reached its destination without disturbing the device's salient functions of protection and containment of the beverage. An example of an attempt to construct such a cap is U.S. Pat. No. 5,282,541, issued Feb. 1, 1994 to Chen, which relates to a cap locking device. The cap locking device has a dome-shaped bottle cap which threadably closes an inner bottle, a tubular post which extends down through the bottle cap and into the inner bottle, and a nipple through which the contained beverage can be accessed by pushing on a push button. Unfortunately, however, the construction of the push button and the device as a whole is made up of many different parts, some of which are movable, and thus all of which may be subject to improper assembly and breakage.
Another example is U.S. Pat. No. 5,277,324, issued Jan. 11, 1994 to Cash, which relates to a bottle cover which fits over a bottle cap and has a body cavity in which a fluid absorbing sponge material is placed. The absorbing sponge is so arranged as to absorb fluid which may overflow from the associated bottle during opening and thus acts to avoid spillage. Unfortunately, however, the beverage thus absorbed by the sponge is no longer utilizable by the consumer.
Thus, as can be seen, there remains a need for a device which allows adequate protection and containment of the beverage for shipping and transportation purposes while still also allowing easy access to the beverage by a consumer or such once the device has reached its destination.